[ExSoldier]

But .... then I remembered Kent State.

The Guardsmen who fired at Kent State should have been court martialled then drawn and quartered.... for incompetence.

They fired and killed innocent bystanders over 400 meters from the action. IF you're going to shoot, you'd better have a dead body for every round fired and it better be in the target group! 12 shots, means 12 dead bodies at the point of conflict. That way, even if it was shown that the order to fire was wrong, at least it would have shown they knew what they were doing and the dead were associated with the direct event. Not just going to class a quarter of a mile distant and uninvolved....

[shove_it]

This type of civil disobedience rarely happens in the USA. The Kent State event in 1970 is the most recent I believe. There was another one in 1963 when hundreds of thousands marched on Washington, D.C. in MLK's Freedom March. It was not publicized but those of us serving in the Military District of Washington (MDW) underwent a couple weeks of riot control training. At the time, I was HQ Company supply clerk in The Old Guard at Ft. Myer in ANC and we all went through the training with fixed bayonets and gas masks. To make a long story short, on the morning of the "March" all the armorers and supply clerks issued weapons and gear to the troops. NCOs were issued ammo and we all loaded into deuce and half trucks strung with chicken wire to protect us against thrown objects and awaited the order to move out.

As I sat nervously in that truck, the colonel commanding the battalion of about 700 walked down the line of trucks telling us to remember our training and follow orders. He then said grimly: "you may have to kill some Americans today". Then he moved on to the next truck.

In my truck we wondered how 700 grunts were going to control hundreds of thousands of angry Americans but there was no doubt among us that we would FOLLOW ORDERS. That's what soldiers did then and that's what soldiers always do.

Thankfully it all turned out peacefully and we went back to our normal duty of burying dead warriors with honor.